This is the “pocket.” To keep the flow of proofread copy going, the chief must be “in pocket.” If he goes away for any length of time, he’s “out of the pocket,” unavailable, and things grind to a halt. In the fast-waning newspaper office, the copy chief sits in the crook of a horseshoe-shaped desk, surrounded by … copy editors. Suzanne Kemmer told of hearing it in Texas from “an old-timey columnist for the local paper.” Another commenter, with the handle of RSHS, offered this etymology: More support for the journalism angle comes from some of the comments on the Language Log. If a reporter was unreachable (say, on a plane to Tibet), he or she was said to be “out of pocket.” Reporters who had filed stories were supposed to supply phone numbers where they could be reached in case questions arose. I first came across this meaning in the early 1980s when I was a staff editor at the New York Times. Once again, a reader had written in wondering about “out of pocket” to mean “unreachable.” Here’s O’Conner’s response: This connection was mentioned in a 2007 post on the blog Grammarphobia, by Patricia T. In her column, Jan Freeman also referenced a 1980 “On Language” column by William Safire, in which he responded to a reader’s question about “out of pocket.” Safire didn’t make the Southern connection according to Freeman, he judged it to be just some journalism jargon. In addition to being associated with Southern American English, “out of pocket” seems to be more common among journalists.
If you … have ever been sick and the only doctor is out of pocket for the weekend, then you know we need more doctors.
And the OED’s next citation, from 1974, is from a South Carolina newspaper. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter, was born in North Carolina and spent much of his adult life in Texas. But DARE was the first to peg this meaning for “out of pocket” as a Southernism, and the OED citation backed this up: O. Henry example, but when Freeman wrote her column, that DARE citation was the earliest known written usage of “out of pocket” used to mean “unreachable.” The OED, in contrast, didn’t even have an entry for this meaning.īut sometime between Freeman’s column in 1997 and Liberman’s post in 2009, the OED caught up, smashing DARE’s antedating with its find. Of course, 1967 is almost 60 years after 1908, the date of the O. As for the “unreachable” meaning, Freeman had called on Joan Hall, the editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English (“DARE” for short), who identified this idiom as a feature of Southern American English going back to at least 1967. In this piece, she first nodded to the meaning that is probably more familiar to most of you: “out of pocket” refers to expenses you cover yourself, as opposed to expenses that are paid by someone else, such as your employer or your insurance company. Liberman’s post on “out of pocket” received several dozen comments in the weeks after it was published, and one was from Jan Freeman, who at the time wrote a language column for the “Boston Globe.” Freeman quoted from a piece she’d written in 1997. He found that the OED’s earliest citation was from a 1908 short story by O. Like Barb, Liberman was puzzled by this meaning of “out of pocket” and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Both his publicist and a state senator described him as “out of pocket.” It later turned out he’d been in South America during his “out-of-pocketry,” having an affair with an Argentinian woman. Well, Barb, it’s been a few years, but here, at last, is that episode on “out of pocket”! ‘Out of pocket’ is out of rangeĪfter I wrote my short response, a commenter named Lynn Eggers linked to a 2009 post on Language Log, written by Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.Ī mysterious disappearance in the news piqued Liberman’s curiosity about why “out of pocket” is used to mean “unreachable.” South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was nowhere to be found, not answering his phone or returning his emails.
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